Terry PratchettHome of Discworld and bestselling fantasy novels.2015-03-02T10:32:34Zhttp://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/?feed=atomWordPresslswainbankhttp://www.terrypratchett.co.uk/?p=57762015-03-02T10:32:34Z2015-03-02T10:08:23ZThe Colour of Magic has been chosen by Katharine Whitehorn as one of her favourite books and it’s going to feature in the next series of A Good Read on BBC Radio 4. The program will air on 3rd March, 4:30pm GMT.

]]>0lswainbankhttp://www.terrypratchett.co.uk/?p=57512015-02-18T16:55:23Z2015-02-18T15:43:09ZOberon Books is delighted to announce the publication of three new Terry Pratchett adaptations by Stephen Briggs in March 2015. Feet of Clay, Unseen Academicals, and The Rince Cycle (the best bits of The Light Fantastic, The Colour of Magic and Sourcery) are available as single editions, and as a collection called All the Discworld’s a Stage.

Commissioning Editor George Spender said: ‘As a long-time admirer of the Discworld series it’s been a real thrill working on these new adaptations with Stephen. These highly inventive plays are perfect for theatre companies looking for something original to stage.’

]]>0lswainbankhttp://www.terrypratchett.co.uk/?p=57362015-01-30T14:47:12Z2015-01-30T14:46:20ZWe’re about to start building a brand new official website for Sir Terry, and we’d love to hear your opinions and ideas before we get cracking.

The questions aim to find out how (and if) you use the current site, and what you’d like to see on the new one.

It shouldn’t take more than five minutes to complete! Thanks for your feedback.

]]>5lswainbankhttp://www.terrypratchett.co.uk/?p=57012014-12-10T17:35:25Z2014-12-10T17:30:12ZFeast your ears on this sneak preview of the Radio 4 drama, starring Colin Morgan, Charlotte Ritchie and many more…

For fans of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s comic fantasy novel Good Omens, it’ll be a long two-week wait until its Radio 4 adaptation begins on the 22nd December – but we’re letting you peek under the Christmas tree early.

RadioTimes.com can reveal some of the Good Omens cast speaking in character, including Merlin’s Colin Morgan as Newt Pulsifer and future Call the Midwife star Charlotte Ritchie as Anathema Device.

Written in 1990, Good Omens follows the attempts of an angel and a demon to save the world from the antichrist, but all is not as it seems thanks to a bureaucratic mix-up. Soon, the fate of humanity is left to a gang of young children, a trainee witchfinder and a collection of garbled flashcards. To paraphrase Colin Morgan’s Newt, below – something weird is DEFINITELY happening.

]]>0lswainbankhttp://www.terrypratchett.co.uk/?p=56842014-12-03T17:49:09Z2014-12-03T17:49:09ZTwo professional philosophers – and Discworld fans – have produced a volume of essays examining the author’s epistemological, moral and existential implications

Philosophers looking for fresh insights into metaphysics, epistemology and ethics can add another author to their reading list, as a study reveals the philosophical issues explored in the work of Terry Pratchett.

Edited by philosophy professors and Pratchett fans James South and Jacob Held, the collection of essays examines questions including “Plato, the Witch, and the Cave: Granny Weatherwax and the Moral Problem of Paternalism”, “Equality and Difference: Just because the Disc Is Flat, Doesn’t Make It a Level Playing Field for All”, “Hogfather and the Existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard”, and “the Importance of Being in the Right Trouser Leg of Time”.

“Pratchett is a very smart man, a gifted writer, and understands as well as any philosopher the power of storytelling and the problems humans face in making sense of their lives and the world they live in,” South said. “Or, as Death puts it so well: ‘DO NOT PUT ALL YOUR TRUST IN ROOT VEGETABLES. WHAT THINGS SEEM TO BE MAY NOT BE WHAT THEY ARE.’ This is a truth that Pratchett relatedly acknowledges and tries to get his readers to acknowledge as well.”

The adaptation of the fantasy novel will air on Radio 4 this Christmas – and one eager fan will be in the cast

Plenty of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett fans are excited about the upcoming radio adaptation of the authors’ joint novel Good Omens – but it turns out one of them is actually in the cast.

“I’ve always been a fan of Terry Pratchett, I think he’s great,” Colin Morgan (who plays Newt in the fantasy comedy) told RadioTimes.com. “So when Good Omens came along it was a bit of a no-brainer for me. “

“I’ve always felt this about Terry’s books and Neil’s books – they’re an absolute pleasure to read personally, but I think they’re just an honour and a privilege to get the chance to perform professionally.”

Also starring Mark Heap, Peter Serafinowicz, Sherlock’s Louise Brealey and Fresh Meat’s Charlotte Ritchie, Good Omens follows the attempts of an angel and a demon to save the world from the antichrist – but all is not as it seems.

It was written by Gaiman and Pratchett in 1990, and became a bestseller that remains popular to this day – and while the authors haven’t had too big a role in the radio adaptation (Gaiman has pitched in with the scripts), they will be popping up in cameos.

“Neil was at the read-through, so I met him there,” Morgan confirmed. “Terry isn’t able to travel as much, but his cameo has been recorded.”

And despite the touchy religious subject matter, Morgan is convinced the radio drama will fit in perfectly in the Christmas schedules.

“It’s a story about the antichrist,” he said. “There’s nothing more festive than that!”

The first update to the Discworld App for iPad featuring four new locations, new images and information to explore including the Administrative Office of the AM&SPH Railway for information on the new steam-powered train service to and from Ankh-Morpork.

]]>0lswainbankhttp://www.terrypratchett.co.uk/?p=56392014-10-07T11:17:55Z2014-10-07T11:14:23ZSuzanne Bridson, an editor at Terry Pratchett‘s publishers, shares a few Roundworld inspirations for his most recent Discworld novel, Raising Steam.

Anyone who has ever read a Discworld novel knows that despite being flat, and travelling through space on the back of a giant turtle (and being inhabited by dwarfs and trolls) Terry Pratchett’s world is in many ways a mirror image of our own. Sometimes the links are obvious – Edith Nesmith in Raising Steam, for example, who has a special interest in children heroically preventing accidents on the railway, could not be much closer to E. Nesbit, real world author of The Railway Children, without , well – actually BEING her.

But if you look beneath the surface of a Discworld novel, past the most obvious jokes, there are layers and layers more of real-world influences creeping in, which is what makes Discworld feel so familiar a place, despite all the magic. They are cleverly woven together from snippets of knowledge gleaned here there and everywhere by an author who has seen a lot, done a lot, and who as a child set out to read his way through the library, and hasn’t stopped since.

Iron Girder evolves – in one single train she embodies years and years’ worth of work by numerous inventors and engineers.

Steam trains are undeniably imported from the real world, or as Discworld aficionados would call it, Roundworld. But there are steam trains and there are steam trains – and Terry’s are solidly grounded in history and all those books he’s read (this resulted in a very specific brief for his cover designer). The Raising Steam train, Iron Girder, ends up bearing a close resemblance to the Lion locomotive that plied the first passenger line between Liverpool and Manchester. (Lion later starred in a 1953 comedy film, The Titfield Thunderbolt, seen and loved by Terry and still highly recommended by him, if you haven’t come across it – it’s no coincidence that a character in Raising Steam bears the name Thunderbolt, and in fact one of the earliest stories Terry ever wrote, for a local paper as a teenager, was the steam-powered tale of Humphrey Newt and the Thunderbolt Carriage.) However, Iron Girder evolves – in one single train she embodies years and years’ worth of work by numerous inventors and engineers. The “pro-to-type” incarnation of Iron Girder at the start of the book is more like the engines designed by Richard Trevithick, thirty years before Lion first raised steam. Trevithick tried to get the public excited about the strange and new-fangled idea of steam power by setting up a “steam circus” in London where for one shilling punters could ride his engine round a circular track. Unfortunately, the citizens of regency London didn’t go mad for locomotion in the way that the people of Ankh-Morpork do in the book (Trevithick’s engine had a tendency to derail, not an ideal feature for a fairground ride), and there really were fears, in case you mistake them for fiction, that steam trains would frighten horses, ruin sheep’s fleeces and even, at high speeds, cause asphyxiation. Raising Steam is a story of what might have been in the real world if everyone (or at least the ones not concerned about their sheep) had been keen from the start on steam trains, and if one inventor had the vision to create not just the early prototype engine but every engine that came after it. And if anoraks had existed in 1808, perhaps.

Terry also had to do practical research into steam trains – there are some things you just can’t learn from books – much of which took place behind the scenes at the Watercress Line, a heritage railway in Hampshire. Naturally, this involved Terry in the driver’s cab, in an engine driver’s hat, getting a good close look at the enormous furnace inside (more properly called the firebox, it really is quite scary, and a very unpleasant way to be bumped off in a fight scene). Terry was also very impressed, as everyone was, quite unexpectedly, by the signal box: a room full of polished brass and huge levers, plus of course a homely fireplace so that the signalman could have his tea in comfort. If you look out for it you will spot a nod to the importance of proper signalling systems in Raising Steam.

Like many other heritage railways, the Watercress Line is run by a mixture of apprentices and enthusiastic tinkerers, including at least one retired civil servant – in the spirit of Raising Steam’s Rufus Drumknott, whose love of paperclips has to take second place to his love of steam. It also takes its name from its most notable cargo during the 19th century – the watercress of Hampshire. In Raising Steam the impetus behind the development of the railway is the need to get perishable food, including watercress but more especially fish, to the city “before it walks there on its own”. This is an echo of the real world Great Western Railway, which in 1876 alone carried 17,000 tons of fish from the Cornish coast to dinner tables in London. Sadly, the decision to name this fish service the Fruits de Mer Express only happened in Discworld.

Look beyond the trains themselves to their destinations and passengers and the Roundworld parallels pop up again. The most exotic train journey operating in Discworld (so far) is the Altiplano Express through the mountains to the bandit country of Zemphis, and beyond to the dwarf mines in Uberwald. Real altiplano trains exist, though in reduced numbers these days, on the high altitude plains of South America, where they were built in part to service the lucrative mining operations of the 19th and early 20th centuries. One such line runs to the edge of Lake Titicaca, where there are floating villages built on islands artificially created by their inhabitants from the reeds and mud of the lake. Not unlike, some might say, the raft people of the Netherglades in Raising Steam (though the villagers of Lake Titicaca certainly don’t have webbed feet). Traversing every one of these routes across the Disc is Georgina Bradshaw, a train enthusiast and compiler of useful information for the intrepid yet respectable traveller. Her real world counterpart is of course George Bradshaw, whose Victorian railway guides remain popular today, despite the timetables being a little out of date, and are celebrated by Michael Portillo in the Great British Railway Journeys TV series.

I could go on like this – and you can do this with any Discworld book – analyse the real world links, spot the cameos and jokes, and eventually develop a weird feeling that you’ve been looking over Terry’s shoulder at what he’s been reading. But it’s important not to miss the point of it all. In Raising Steam, you can investigate what Terry knows about trains (a lot), but what’s much more relevant is the interesting sort of chaos that trains cause when dropped into the melting pot of Discworld, just as football, or moving pictures did before. What’s also key is what Terry thinks about trains – he chuffing loves them. That is the reason that steam came to Discworld at all, the reason why steam (without risking spoilers) will probably save the day. The boys who see a train for the first time and dream of becoming “a master of the sparks! a coachman of the Thunderbolts!”; the passengers at the steam circus running straight to rejoin the queue when their ride ends; maybe even the tinkering goblins but definitely the children who think it’s fun to stick their heads on the tracks to feel the vibration of a train coming – they’re all Terry in some way. Terry Pratchett was a boy who used to flatten coins on train tracks for fun, back in the days before health and safety had been invented. And that’s how you know that steam power arriving in Discworld, despite not seeming like magic as such, will be a Good Thing. And more importantly, an Interesting Thing…

]]>0lswainbankhttp://www.terrypratchett.co.uk/?p=56282014-10-06T13:46:30Z2014-10-06T13:46:30ZHardback titles by the likes of John Cleese and Jacqueline Wilson go on sale in race for Christmas bestseller lists

Tim Walker is expecting queues outside his family’s bookshops in Oakham and Stamford on Thursday. Other booksellers up and down the country will be hoping for a similar rush of eager readers as 315 of the most eagerly awaited hardback titles of the year hit the shelves.

The day has been dubbed “super Thursday” and titles by Andrew Motion, John Cleese and Heston Blumenthal will go on sale in the race for the Christmas bestseller lists. Bookshops hope to cash in as they try to fight back against cut-throat internet competition.

In amongst the new releases, the Guardian lists Mrs Bradshaw’s Handbook:

Mrs Bradshaw’s Handbook by Terry Pratchett Subtitled “to travelling upon the Ankh-Morpork & Sto Plains Hygienic Railway”, this is Pratchett’s guide to the railways of his 40th Discworld novel, Raising Steam. Independent bookseller Peter Donaldson, of Colchester’s Red Lion Books, is tipping this spoof of the Bradshaw railway guides to “lead the way for humour here”.